It publishes zero original reporting and is not a social network. As a work around to the Panda hits, sites like eHow are now becoming collections of niche-focused sites Cuteness.

It appears to be working so far Did an influential "how to" guide become irrelevant after a software or hardware update? Is a problem easy to solve with a short snippet of content?

If so, that can get scraped into the search results. Arguably in most cases the idea of neutral-based publishing no longer works on the modern web.

The shill gets exclusive stories. The political polemic gets automatic retweets from those who identify. There may be a couple exceptions which prove the rule, but new TLDs are generally an awful investment for everyone except the registry operator.

The central web platforms are becoming ad heavy, which in turn decreases the reach of anything which is not an advertisement. Key markets like hotels might get a second round of vertical ads to further displace the concept of organic results.

ALL extensions are stalling. The tech monopolies can only make so much money by stuffing ads onto their own platform. They may even pay a bit upfront for new content formats, but then after the market is primed the deal shifts to where once again almost nobody other than the tech monopoly platform wins.

My own experience with amp is greatly reduced ad revenue. Facebook has the same sort of issues, with frequently needing to restate various metrics while partners fly blind.

Have you tried Angry Birds lately? All extractive logic meant to trick you into another in-app payment. This fantasy that they will be greeted as liberators.

When the new boss is really a lot like the old boss, except the big stick is replaced with the big algorithm. Depersonalizing all punishment but doling it out just the same.

So commercial dissent is near impossible. Pitting one individual contractor against another in a race to the bottom. Hoarding all the bargaining power at the top.

Disparaging any attempts against those at the bottom to organize with unions or otherwise. To be a success on the attention platforms you have to push toward the edges.

But as you become successful you become a target. Pewdiepie is the biggest success story on the YouTube platform.

When he made a video showing some of the absurd aspects of Fiverr it led to a WSJ investigation which "uncovered" a pattern of anti-semitism.

And yet one of the reporters who worked on that story wrote far more offensive and anti-semetic tweets. If it can happen to a leading player in a closed ecosystem then the risk to smaller players is even greater.

Big keywords like [payday loans] in core trusted extensions are not missed. Why did exact match domains fall so hard?

In part because Google shifted from scoring the web based on links to considering things like brand awareness in rankings. And it is very hard to run a large brand-oriented ad campaign promoting a generically descriptive domain name.

Sure there are a few exceptions like Cars. Not all domains have fallen quite that hard in price, but the more into the tail you go the less the domain acts as a memorable differentiator.

If the barrier to entry increases, then the justification for spending a lot on a domain name as part of a go to market strategy makes less sense.

Arguably EMDs have lost more value than brandable domain names, but even brandable names have sharply slid. If you go back a decade or two tech startups would secure their name say Snap.

Jelly was recently acquired by Pinterest. Rather than buying jelly. This in turn means that rather than 10,s of startups all chasing their core.

Where are the domain registries who have built successful new businesses on some of their new TLDs? So many of them are short sighted greed-based plays that they do the exact opposite of building an ecosystem Anyone dumb enough to pay that would be better off buying their own registry rather than a single name.

The holding back of names is the exact opposite of savvy marketing investment. Who defeats the race to the bottom aspects of the web by starting off from a "we only sell shit" standpoint?

Many online verticals are driven by winner take most monopoly economics. Some other core markets have consolidated down to 3 or 4 core players who among them own about 50 different brands that attack different parts of the market.

Contrast the lack of marketing for new TLDs with all the marketing one sees for the. A decade ago domainers were frustrated Verisign increased the price of.

Every mom, every pop, every company that holds a domain name had no say in the matter. Imagine what sort of blowback PIR would get from influential charities if they tried to increase the price of.

It would be such a public relations disaster it would never be considered. Domain registries are not particularly expensive to run. Other domains will also see price increases.

Why would anyone want to build a commercial enterprise or anything they care about on such a shoddy foundation? The claim the new TLDs need more revenues to exist are untrue.

There are hundreds of these new TLD extensions and almost none of them can be trusted to be a wise investment when compared against similar names in established extensions like.

All the above are the mechanics of "why" prices have been dropping, but it is also worth noting many of the leading portfolios have been sold.

That might be due to my cynical views of the market, but I did hold many names for a decade or more. As barrier to entry increases, many of the legacy domains which could have one day been worth developing have lost much of their value.

And the picked over new TLDs are an even worse investment due to the near infinite downside potential of price hikes, registries outright folding, etc.

Most of the registration graphs for new TLDs are far uglier than the one posted above. China will not save the new gTLDs.

Into this face of declining value there is a rush of oversupply WITH irrational above-market pricing. As much as I cringe at.

Any baggage they may carry is less than the risk of going with an unproven new extension without any protections whatsoever. Uniregistry does not believe that registry fees should rise when the costs of other technology services have uniformly trended downward, simply because a registry operator believes it can extract higher profit from its base of registrants.

Are they pricing these names in Zimbabwe Dollars? Frank Schilling warned about the dangers of lifting price controls. The combination of "presumptive renewal" and the "lifting of price controls on registry services" is incredibly dangerous.

Rather he felt he would have been made poorer, unless he was the person doing it:. Shortly after the sharp pricing increases were announced GoDaddy dropped Uniregistry domain names.

Tucows later followed suit in dropping the new TLDs with exponential price increases. With that in mind, trademark holders have been more aggressive with trying to push trademark protections on the new TLDs even for nebulous misspellings.

But the nice thing about the feature is you can see how the click rate changes over time as the feature evolves. In some areas like weather Google ends up dominating most the user behavior with their in-SERP feature.

About half of all weather keyword searches do not click on any listings. STATrob glenngabe jenstar pic. As more of the value chain appears in the search results, more of the value chain which formerly appeared on websites disappears.

If central ad networks host your content then they get better user data for your content than you do as a publisher.

Importantly to the digital media industry, it also devalues the context and relationship of consumer trust which drives the businesses of premium publishers.

Some large sites like Google or Facebook either pay ad blockers or technically work around them within their apps. By funding ad blockers exempting the search result page from having their ads blocked, Google is ultimately defunding competing ad networks.

Here are a few examples from Ahrefs. The orange bar shows what percent of the SERP clicks are on ads. And some of the aggressive stuff carries over into other lines of business outside of travel.

When one invests in brand they have to start thinking about how much they are willing to pay Google as an ongoing tithing for their success.

Google is willing to make their results worse to the point they would consider something that looked like their search result page as an ad-heavy doorway redirect page of spam if hosted by anyone other than themselves in order to monetize navigational searches.

When brands make agreements to not cross-bid Google has the FTC sue them. On some high end fashion brands Google lists shopping ads which lead to third party sellers who sell used goods.

Quite often counterfeits will also be in the mix. When the counterfeits are destroyed in the first wash, it is the brand owner who was took to the cleaners.

Remember the whole shtick about good, legitimate, high-quality content being created for readers without concern for search engines - even as though search engines do not exist?

We quickly shifted from the above "ideology" to this:. At the same time, the Google AMP project is being used as the foundation of effective phishing campaigns.

Unfortunately that person is in the PR team, not the product team. If you are an undifferentiated publisher without much in the way of original thought, then jumping through the hoops make sense.

Remember how mobilegeddon was going to be the biggest thing ever? In the above example I am not complaining about ranking 5 and wishing I ranked 2, but rather stating that ranking 1 organically has little to no actual value when it is a couple screens down the page.

An attempt to dismiss the bar leads the person back to Google to click on another listing other than your site.

As bad as I may have made mobile search results appear earlier, I was perhaps being a little too kind. Is it worth doing anything that makes your desktop website worse in an attempt to try to rank a little higher on mobile devices?

I realize that optimizing a site design for mobile or desktop is not mutually exclusive. But it is an issue we will revisit later on in this post.

And if you chose to adopt it, the bad news was you were then spending yet again to undo it when the service was no longer worth running for Google.

Not like Google cared much, as it is their goal to shift as much of the ad spend as they can onto Google. Google is now testing product ads on YouTube.

It is not an accident that Google funds an ad blocker which allows ads to stream through on Google. Faces help people trust the content.

Then they are distracting visual clutter that need expunged. They were once again good for users!!! Or it could be like Google Reader.

With the death of Google reader many blogs also slid into irrelevancy. They tried their best to force broadband providers to be dumb pipes.

Deliberately screwing direct business partners is far worse than coding algorithms which belligerently penalize some competing services all the while ignoring that the payday loan shop funded by Google leverages doorway pages.

This to Transition is going to move us from systems that are explicitly taught to ones that implicitly learn. After three years, Google had a sufficient supply of phonemes that it could begin doing things like voice dictation.

So it discontinued the [phone information] service. How much do they squeeze down on your payout percentage on those pages?

What ad revenue do you get when Google offers voice answers pulled from your content but sends you no visitor? When excluding those two companies, revenue generated by other players in the U.

This problem will only get worse as mobile grows to a larger share of total online advertising:. You pay to get likes, but that is no longer enough as edgerank declines.

You are welcome to pay once again to advertise to the following you already built. The bigger your audience, the more we will charge you!

Oh, and your direct competitors can use people liking your business as an ad targeting group. In his interview with Obama tonight, billmaher suggested the news business should be not-for-profit.

Mission accomplished, thank Facebook. Any hope of AMP turning the corner on the revenue front is a "no go":. Publishers who are critical of AMP were reluctant to speak publicly about their frustrations, or to remove their AMP content.

As more publishers adopt AMP, each publisher in the program will get a smaller share of the overall pie. What ends up happening is eventually the media outlets get sufficiently defunded to where they are sold for a song to a tech company or an executive at a tech company.

The Wall Street Journal recently laid off reporters. The Guardian is literally incinerating over 5 million pounds per month.

That the Denver Guardian an utterly fake paper running fearmongering false stories goes viral is just icing on the cake.

Look at this brazen, amazing garbage. Giving people what they want to see will always draw more attention than making them work for it, in rather the same way that making up news is cheaper and more profitable than actually reporting the truth.

The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings.

Until we treat the millions of kids across America as our own kids, we will pay a major economic price, and talk of the American dream will increasingly seem cynical historical fiction.

Vine by USAforTrump https: An FTC report recommended suing Google for their anti-competitive practices , but no suit was brought.

Years ago many people saw where this was headed:. Their major position is to allow themselves to use copyright material without remuneration.

If the Copyright Office head is towing the Google line, creators are going to get hurt. And in spite of the growing importance of tech media coverage of the industry is a trainwreck:.

Freebies are everywhere, but real access is scant. Being a conduit breeds exclusives. Challenging the grand narrative gets one blackballed.

Google announced they are releasing a mobile first search index:. But using that format is seen as not being mobile friendly.

Imagine you have an auto part database which lists alternate part numbers, price, stock status, nearest store with part in stock, time to delivery, etc.

And good luck if you want to add sorting features on such a table. The theory that using the desktop version of a page to rank mobile results is flawed because users might find something which is only available on the desktop version of a site is a valid point.

Not showing those automotive part databases to desktop users would ultimately make desktop search results worse for users by leaving huge gaps in the search results.

And a search engine choosing to not index the desktop version of a site because there is a mobile version is equally short sighted.

The heavy ad load on mobile search results only further combine with the low conversion rates on mobile to make building a relationship on desktop that much more important.

Google already owns most the profits from that market. Webmasters are better off NOT going mobile friendly than going mobile friendly in a way that compromises the ability of their desktop site.

I am not the only one suggesting an over-simplified mobile design that carries over to a desktop site is a losing proposition.

Publishers are getting squeezed to subsidize the primary web ad networks. But the narrative is that as cross-device tracking improves some of those benefits will eventually spill back out into the partner network.

They are paying to bring new types of content onto their platform, but they are only just now beginning to get around to test pricing their Audience Network traffic based on quality.

Those tracking programs were considered high priority. Further, creating alternative revenue streams becomes vital "to save the company" even if it means selling user data to dangerous dictators.

Spooks preferred to use the Google cookie to spy on users. And now Google allows personally identifiable web tracking. Data is being used in all sorts of crazy ways the central ad networks are utterly unaware of.

These crazy policies are not limited to other countries. Buying dog food with your credit card can lead to pet licensing fees.

Even cheerful "wellness" programs may come with surprises. About 2 months ago I saw a Facebook post done on behalf of a friend of mine.

Gofundme was the plea. She was gainfully employed, had a full time, well paying job. This last week she died. She was 38 years old.

She died not getting access to a treatment that may or may not have saved her life. She died having to hustle folks for funds to just have a chance to get access to another treatment option and she died while worrying about being financially ruined by her illness.

Is this the society we want? People forced to beg friends on gofundme for help so they can get access to medical treatment?

Is this the society we are? Is this truly the best we can do? Click here to read more. No signs of major SERP movement yesterday - the two days since Penguin started rolling out have been quieter than most of September.

Panda updates stopped being announced last year. Instead we now get unnamed "quality" updates. Earlier in the month many SEOs saw significant volatility in the search results, beginning ahead of Labor Day weekend with a local search update.

The algorithm update observations were dismissed as normal fluctuations in spite of the search results being more volatile than they have been in over 4 years.

There are many reasons for search engineers to want to roll out algorithm updates or at least test new algorithms before a long holiday weekend:.

Just about any of the algorithm volatility tools showed far more significant shift earlier in this month than over the past few days. And then the pattern would repeat.

Notice the big ranking moves which became common over the past month were not common the 2 months prior. As it turns out, negative SEO was real , which likely played a part in Google taking years to roll out this Penguin update AND changing how they process Penguin from a sitewide negative factor to something more granular.

Knocks negative SEO out. When Google updates algorithms or refreshes data it does not mean sites which were previously penalized will immediately rank again.

Some penalties absent direct Google investment or nasty public relations blowback for Google require a set amount of time to pass before recovery is even possible.

Google has no incentive to allow a broad-based set of penalty recoveries on the same day they announce a new "better than ever" spam fighting algorithm.

But you can do all of those well enough that you change the political landscape yet still lose money. Even some of the top brands in big money verticals which were known as the canonical examples of SEO success stories are seeing revenue hits and getting squeezed out of the search ecosystem.

And it is getting almost impossible to win in search by focusing on search as an isolated channel. I never understood mentality behind Penguin "recovery" people.

Efforts and investments in chasing the algorithms in isolation are getting less viable by the day. When it happens, that player better have some serious savings or some non-Google revenues, because even with "instant" algorithm updates you can go months or years on reduced revenues waiting for an update.

And if the bulk of your marketing spend while penalized is spent on undoing past marketing spend rather than building awareness in other channels outside of search you can almost guarantee that business is dead.

But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is break their spirits. Google recently made it much harder to receive accurate keyword data from the AdWords keyword tool.

They have not only grouped similar terms, but then they broadened out the data ranges to absurdly wide ranges like 10, to , searches a month.

Only active AdWords advertisers receive somewhat? And even with that, there are limitations. Try to view too many terms and you get:.

This page now shows ranges for search volumes. For a more detailed view, check back in 24 hours. Jennifer Slegg shared a quote from an AdWords advertiser who spoke with a representative:.

They have advised me that there must be continuous activity in your google ad-words campaign clicks and campaigns running for a minimum of months continuous in order to gain focused keyword results.

If you are seeing a range or k or 1k k its likely your adwords account does not have an active campaign or has not had continuous campaigns or clicks.

So you not only need to be an advertiser, but you need to stay active for a quarter-year to a third of a year to get decent data.

But with Google outright hiding keyword data even from active advertisers, it is probably easier and more productive for those advertisers to start elsewhere.

Our keyword tool lists estimated search volumes, bid prices, cross links to SERPs, etc. Using it does require free account registration to use, but it is a one-time registration and the tool is free.

We even shut down our paid members area, so you are not likely to receive any marketing messages from us anytime soon.

If the tool looks like it is getting decent usage, we may upgrade it further to refresh the data more frequently, consider adding more languages, add a few more reference links to related niche sites in the footer cross-reference section, and maybe add a few other features.

A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.

After viewing it we hope to see you join our community! We offer the 1 SEO training program. Join Free About Support Login. Gain a competitive advantage Today!

In constantly seeking pleasure we forego happiness. It is, rather, as intended: Share posed photos to make your friends feel their lives are worse than your life is.

There is a product which can deliver you pleasure Using machine learning to drive rankings is ultimately an exercise in confirmation bias: Outside of a few central monopoly attention merchant players, the ad-based web is dying.

D Other hopeful unicorn media startups appear to have peaked as well. But other than that, it is slim pickings. Sure it is not the ad revenues they are stealing.

Rather it is the content. That is, after all, how monopolies negotiate - ultimatums. And search is just another vertical they made irrelevant.

And for the key verticals they kept, they have pages like the following, which look like a diet version of eHow Every day they send users away to other sites with deeper content.

It is hard to see what Yahoo! Grist for the Machine. Grist Much like publishers, employees at the big tech monopolies can end up little more than grist.

They are accelerating the worst aspects of consolidated power: Rehabilitation is hard work: Mob rule - with a splash of violence - for the win. Social justice is the antithesis of justice.

FANG The more I study the macro picture the more concerned I get about the long term ramifications of a financially ever more divergent society.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.

Such sites may not rank as highly going forward. Especially when combined with this:. As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results.

Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to "see web results.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. Bad news for TRIP. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song , but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:.

People can literally switch their name to "Loop dee Loop" and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:. Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy!

Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can. The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this.

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website.

That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships , begging for anti-trust exemptions , or whining about Google is going to fix the problem. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business.

But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. The following sounds a lot more desperate:. And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, "because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage. The struggles are all across the media landscape. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:.

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots RADAR , will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30, pieces of content for local media each month.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https: The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:. In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second.

Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks. Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers.

Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this. And that voice shift is happening fast: If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism.

As big publishers employ the tactic , Google ranks it. Checking some Heliograf articles AI-written reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter , a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially , but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business.

Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:. If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?

Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:. That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot. Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly. What are the 22 words? Publishers buying the "speed" narrative are failing themselves.

The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results , often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

They can hard-code any data type or feature , price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images. The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach.

Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy.

And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience.

What is the real risk of AI? And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: Google killed publishing in And if publishing was killed in , things have only got worse since then:.

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts.

Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to.

So why rock the boat? Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices.

In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies. Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool. Now you can know exactly where they rank, pick off their best keywords, and track new opportunities as they emerge.

Both of these issues should now be fixed if you update your Firefox extensions. Years ago we created a new logo for rank checker which we finally got around to changing it today.

Last August I wrote a blog post about how attention merchants were sucking the value out of online publishing. In it I noted how the Yahoo!

The concept of a neutral web is dead. In its place is agenda-driven media. As the tech oligarchs broadly defund publishing, the publishers still need to eat.

Aggregate information quality declines to make the numbers work. And on March 17th the directory went offline. Some existing DMOZ editors are planning on launching a new directory under a different name but as of the 17th DMOZ editors put up a copy at dmoztools.

DMOZ was not without criticism or controversy ,. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October , Topix.

Early in the history of DMOZ, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone or CNN, editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites.

Links to individual CNN articles were added until , but were entirely removed from the directory in January due to the content being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain.

Many great sites span multiple categories. Every large quality site has some misinformation on it. The web of pages vs web of sites concept can be easily observed in how some of the early successful content platforms have broken down their broad-based content portals into a variety of niche sites.

That is how eHow became the core of a multi-billion Dollar company. Demand Media showed other publishers the way.

And if the other existing sites were to stay competitive, they also had to water down content quality to make the numbers back out. The problem with this was the glut of content was lower ad rates.

And the decline in ad rates was coupled with a shift away from a links-only view of search relevancy to a model based on weighting link profiles against user engagement metrics.

However nothing they did on that domain name was ever going to work. They dug too deep of a hole selling the growth story to pump a multi-billion Dollar valuation.

The flip side of that story is the newspaper chains, which rushed to partner with Demand Media to build eHow-inspired sections on their sites.

Brands which enjoy the Google brand subsidy are also quite hip to work with Demand Media, which breathes new life into once retired content: The rise of time spent on social sites only made it harder for websites to be sought out destination.

And the best niche editorial remains worthy of a direct visit:. Everything about Techmeme and its lingering success seems to defy the contemporary wisdom of building a popular website.

It publishes zero original reporting and is not a social network. As a work around to the Panda hits, sites like eHow are now becoming collections of niche-focused sites Cuteness.

It appears to be working so far Did an influential "how to" guide become irrelevant after a software or hardware update? Is a problem easy to solve with a short snippet of content?

If so, that can get scraped into the search results. Arguably in most cases the idea of neutral-based publishing no longer works on the modern web.

The shill gets exclusive stories. The political polemic gets automatic retweets from those who identify. There may be a couple exceptions which prove the rule, but new TLDs are generally an awful investment for everyone except the registry operator.

The central web platforms are becoming ad heavy, which in turn decreases the reach of anything which is not an advertisement.

Key markets like hotels might get a second round of vertical ads to further displace the concept of organic results. ALL extensions are stalling.

The tech monopolies can only make so much money by stuffing ads onto their own platform. They may even pay a bit upfront for new content formats, but then after the market is primed the deal shifts to where once again almost nobody other than the tech monopoly platform wins.

My own experience with amp is greatly reduced ad revenue. Facebook has the same sort of issues, with frequently needing to restate various metrics while partners fly blind.

Have you tried Angry Birds lately? All extractive logic meant to trick you into another in-app payment. This fantasy that they will be greeted as liberators.

When the new boss is really a lot like the old boss, except the big stick is replaced with the big algorithm.

Depersonalizing all punishment but doling it out just the same. So commercial dissent is near impossible. Pitting one individual contractor against another in a race to the bottom.

Hoarding all the bargaining power at the top. Disparaging any attempts against those at the bottom to organize with unions or otherwise.

To be a success on the attention platforms you have to push toward the edges. But as you become successful you become a target. Pewdiepie is the biggest success story on the YouTube platform.

When he made a video showing some of the absurd aspects of Fiverr it led to a WSJ investigation which "uncovered" a pattern of anti-semitism.

And yet one of the reporters who worked on that story wrote far more offensive and anti-semetic tweets. If it can happen to a leading player in a closed ecosystem then the risk to smaller players is even greater.

Big keywords like [payday loans] in core trusted extensions are not missed. Why did exact match domains fall so hard? In part because Google shifted from scoring the web based on links to considering things like brand awareness in rankings.

And it is very hard to run a large brand-oriented ad campaign promoting a generically descriptive domain name.

Sure there are a few exceptions like Cars. Not all domains have fallen quite that hard in price, but the more into the tail you go the less the domain acts as a memorable differentiator.

If the barrier to entry increases, then the justification for spending a lot on a domain name as part of a go to market strategy makes less sense.

Arguably EMDs have lost more value than brandable domain names, but even brandable names have sharply slid. If you go back a decade or two tech startups would secure their name say Snap.

Jelly was recently acquired by Pinterest. Rather than buying jelly. This in turn means that rather than 10,s of startups all chasing their core.

Where are the domain registries who have built successful new businesses on some of their new TLDs? So many of them are short sighted greed-based plays that they do the exact opposite of building an ecosystem Anyone dumb enough to pay that would be better off buying their own registry rather than a single name.

The holding back of names is the exact opposite of savvy marketing investment. Who defeats the race to the bottom aspects of the web by starting off from a "we only sell shit" standpoint?

Many online verticals are driven by winner take most monopoly economics. Some other core markets have consolidated down to 3 or 4 core players who among them own about 50 different brands that attack different parts of the market.

Contrast the lack of marketing for new TLDs with all the marketing one sees for the. A decade ago domainers were frustrated Verisign increased the price of.

Every mom, every pop, every company that holds a domain name had no say in the matter. Imagine what sort of blowback PIR would get from influential charities if they tried to increase the price of.

It would be such a public relations disaster it would never be considered. Domain registries are not particularly expensive to run.

Other domains will also see price increases. Why would anyone want to build a commercial enterprise or anything they care about on such a shoddy foundation?

The claim the new TLDs need more revenues to exist are untrue. There are hundreds of these new TLD extensions and almost none of them can be trusted to be a wise investment when compared against similar names in established extensions like.

All the above are the mechanics of "why" prices have been dropping, but it is also worth noting many of the leading portfolios have been sold.

That might be due to my cynical views of the market, but I did hold many names for a decade or more. As barrier to entry increases, many of the legacy domains which could have one day been worth developing have lost much of their value.

And the picked over new TLDs are an even worse investment due to the near infinite downside potential of price hikes, registries outright folding, etc.

Most of the registration graphs for new TLDs are far uglier than the one posted above. China will not save the new gTLDs. Into this face of declining value there is a rush of oversupply WITH irrational above-market pricing.

As much as I cringe at. Any baggage they may carry is less than the risk of going with an unproven new extension without any protections whatsoever.

Uniregistry does not believe that registry fees should rise when the costs of other technology services have uniformly trended downward, simply because a registry operator believes it can extract higher profit from its base of registrants.

Are they pricing these names in Zimbabwe Dollars? Frank Schilling warned about the dangers of lifting price controls.

The combination of "presumptive renewal" and the "lifting of price controls on registry services" is incredibly dangerous.

Rather he felt he would have been made poorer, unless he was the person doing it:. Shortly after the sharp pricing increases were announced GoDaddy dropped Uniregistry domain names.

Tucows later followed suit in dropping the new TLDs with exponential price increases. With that in mind, trademark holders have been more aggressive with trying to push trademark protections on the new TLDs even for nebulous misspellings.

But the nice thing about the feature is you can see how the click rate changes over time as the feature evolves. In some areas like weather Google ends up dominating most the user behavior with their in-SERP feature.

About half of all weather keyword searches do not click on any listings. STATrob glenngabe jenstar pic.

As more of the value chain appears in the search results, more of the value chain which formerly appeared on websites disappears. If central ad networks host your content then they get better user data for your content than you do as a publisher.

Importantly to the digital media industry, it also devalues the context and relationship of consumer trust which drives the businesses of premium publishers.

Some large sites like Google or Facebook either pay ad blockers or technically work around them within their apps. By funding ad blockers exempting the search result page from having their ads blocked, Google is ultimately defunding competing ad networks.

Here are a few examples from Ahrefs. The orange bar shows what percent of the SERP clicks are on ads. And some of the aggressive stuff carries over into other lines of business outside of travel.

When one invests in brand they have to start thinking about how much they are willing to pay Google as an ongoing tithing for their success.

Google is willing to make their results worse to the point they would consider something that looked like their search result page as an ad-heavy doorway redirect page of spam if hosted by anyone other than themselves in order to monetize navigational searches.

When brands make agreements to not cross-bid Google has the FTC sue them. On some high end fashion brands Google lists shopping ads which lead to third party sellers who sell used goods.

Quite often counterfeits will also be in the mix. When the counterfeits are destroyed in the first wash, it is the brand owner who was took to the cleaners.

Remember the whole shtick about good, legitimate, high-quality content being created for readers without concern for search engines - even as though search engines do not exist?

We quickly shifted from the above "ideology" to this:. At the same time, the Google AMP project is being used as the foundation of effective phishing campaigns.

Unfortunately that person is in the PR team, not the product team. If you are an undifferentiated publisher without much in the way of original thought, then jumping through the hoops make sense.

Remember how mobilegeddon was going to be the biggest thing ever? In the above example I am not complaining about ranking 5 and wishing I ranked 2, but rather stating that ranking 1 organically has little to no actual value when it is a couple screens down the page.

An attempt to dismiss the bar leads the person back to Google to click on another listing other than your site. As bad as I may have made mobile search results appear earlier, I was perhaps being a little too kind.

Is it worth doing anything that makes your desktop website worse in an attempt to try to rank a little higher on mobile devices?

I realize that optimizing a site design for mobile or desktop is not mutually exclusive. But it is an issue we will revisit later on in this post.

And if you chose to adopt it, the bad news was you were then spending yet again to undo it when the service was no longer worth running for Google.

Not like Google cared much, as it is their goal to shift as much of the ad spend as they can onto Google. Google is now testing product ads on YouTube.

It is not an accident that Google funds an ad blocker which allows ads to stream through on Google. Faces help people trust the content. Then they are distracting visual clutter that need expunged.

They were once again good for users!!! Or it could be like Google Reader. With the death of Google reader many blogs also slid into irrelevancy.

They tried their best to force broadband providers to be dumb pipes. Deliberately screwing direct business partners is far worse than coding algorithms which belligerently penalize some competing services all the while ignoring that the payday loan shop funded by Google leverages doorway pages.

This to Transition is going to move us from systems that are explicitly taught to ones that implicitly learn. After three years, Google had a sufficient supply of phonemes that it could begin doing things like voice dictation.

So it discontinued the [phone information] service. How much do they squeeze down on your payout percentage on those pages? What ad revenue do you get when Google offers voice answers pulled from your content but sends you no visitor?

When excluding those two companies, revenue generated by other players in the U. This problem will only get worse as mobile grows to a larger share of total online advertising:.

You pay to get likes, but that is no longer enough as edgerank declines. You are welcome to pay once again to advertise to the following you already built.

The bigger your audience, the more we will charge you! Oh, and your direct competitors can use people liking your business as an ad targeting group.

In his interview with Obama tonight, billmaher suggested the news business should be not-for-profit. Mission accomplished, thank Facebook.

Any hope of AMP turning the corner on the revenue front is a "no go":. Publishers who are critical of AMP were reluctant to speak publicly about their frustrations, or to remove their AMP content.

But using princess star casino bonus code format is seen as not being mobile friendly. The shill gets exclusive stories. How much control can one entity get before it becomes excessive? These firms and a few others, it is now widely acknowledged, dominate everything. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks. Some labs started offering kickbacks to treatment centers, who in turn began splitting the profits with halfway houses that would tempt clients with free rent and other services. The web is becoming easier to get bmw neuerscheinungencasino epoca 5 free due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as 888 casino toll free make us feel more isolated and left out. And it is getting almost impossible to win in search by focusing on search as an isolated channel. Even fairy tail zeichen biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: So here are some of the obvious algorithmic holes left by the new Penguin approach It has also held back productivity, since raising prices restricts economic output.